Going for Broke: 5 Experiments That Went Out in a Blaze of Glory

Scientists have used the last moments of major experiments or spacecraft to make a push for knowledge--or to produce some fireworks

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MOON MISSILE:

The first man-made object to reach the lunar surface did not go down gently. The Soviet Luna 2 probe was intentionally plowed into the moon in 1959, achieving the first lunar landing—albeit a hard one.....[
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MOON MISSILE:

The first man-made object to reach the lunar surface did not go down gently. The Soviet Luna 2 probe was intentionally plowed into the moon in 1959, achieving the first lunar landing—albeit a hard one. Beforehand, it had collected data on the moon and on cislunar space—the region between Earth and its natural satellite—with a suite of instruments that included radiation detectors, a magnetometer and micrometeorite detector. The U.S. would not send a probe to the surface of the moon until 1962. It, too, had a hard-landing.

TAKING THE PLUNGE:

After nearly eight years spent exploring Jupiter and its moons, NASA's Galileo spacecraft did not ease into peaceful retirement. Instead, in September 2003, as its fuel tank was running dry, the craft was sent hurtling into Jupiter's crushing atmosphere at 48.2 kilometers per second (more than 100,000 miles per hour) and surely disintegrated.....[
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TAKING THE PLUNGE:

After nearly eight years spent exploring Jupiter and its moons, NASA's Galileo spacecraft did not ease into peaceful retirement. Instead, in September 2003, as its fuel tank was running dry, the craft was sent hurtling into Jupiter's crushing atmosphere at 48.2 kilometers per second (more than 100,000 miles per hour) and surely disintegrated. Galileo was intentionally destroyed rather than left to die in orbit to prevent it from ever impacting the Jovian moon Europa, which astrobiologists suspect could harbor life in a subterranean ocean. In some ways Galileo was a victim of its own success—its flybys of Europa had bolstered the ocean hypothesis, which in turn necessitated the spacecraft's safe disposal to avoid contaminating a potentially habitable environment with microbes brought from Earth.

HIGGS HUNTING:

Space missions are not the only ones to go for broke. The Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider at CERN in Europe did not find the elusive Higgs boson—that challenge has fallen to its successor, the Large Hadron Collider.....[
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HIGGS HUNTING:

Space missions are not the only ones to go for broke. The Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider at CERN in Europe did not find the elusive Higgs boson—that challenge has fallen to its successor, the Large Hadron Collider. But LEP's failure to identify the Higgs was not for lack of trying. In 2000, its last year of operation, scientists cranked up the accelerator energy well beyond its original design specs to make a final lunge at the Higgs. Fortunately, no catastrophe struck the LEP during its redline run. Unfortunately, despite suggestive hints, the Higgs didn't show up, either.

SHORT-LIVED SATELLITE:

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) began and ended its mission in 2009. LCROSS's charge was to find out whether craters near the moon's poles contain water ice—and if so, how much.....[
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SHORT-LIVED SATELLITE:

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) began and ended its mission in 2009. LCROSS's charge was to find out whether craters near the moon's poles contain water ice—and if so, how much. It shot a spent rocket booster toward a polar crater called Cabeus to document what the collision excavated. The spacecraft's instruments indeed registered the spectroscopic signal of water in the debris plume, but not for long: the LCROSS spacecraft, following behind the high-speed projectile to get a close look, itself impacted the moon four minutes later.

TILTING AT VENUS:

NASA's Magellan probe orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994 and produced detailed radar and topographic maps of 98 percent of its surface. But there was one thing it couldn’t measure: atmospheric properties.....[
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TILTING AT VENUS:

NASA's Magellan probe orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994 and produced detailed radar and topographic maps of 98 percent of its surface. But there was one thing it couldn’t measure: atmospheric properties. So when the probe was beginning to die anyway, mission controllers directed it to skim the Venusian atmosphere, using the spacecraft and its solar panels as a windmill to measure the resistance of atmospheric gases, hence their density. Over a number of weeks, NASA lowered Magellan's orbit until the spacecraft was just 140 kilometers above the planet, after which it was quickly dragged down by the planet's thick atmosphere. Based on the results, NASA engineers began designing Mars missions to enter orbit by using atmospheric friction rather than rockets to burn off speed, a technique known as aerobraking. The Carpe Atmospherum ("seize the atmosphere") poster above commemorates Magellan's final plunge and disintegration.